Monday, December 1, 2008

I Cannot Sell My Conscience

A selection from a letter by C. H. Spurgeon to the co-pastor and deacons of his church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, England. He had withdrawn membership in the Baptist Union because liberalism was tolerated and had been censured for it. He was in Mentone, France for some rest and recuperation when he wrote this letter on November 27, 1887.

The more you know of this controversy [The Downgrade Controversy], the more will your judgements go with me as well as your hearts. It is not possible for me to communicate to any one all that has passed under my knowledge; but I have had abundant reason for every step I have taken, as the day of days will reveal. All over the various churches there is the same evil, in all denominations in measure; and from all sorts of believers comes the same thankful expression of delight that the schemes of errorists have been defeated by pouring light upon them. I cannot at this present tell you what spite has been used against me, or you would wonder indeed; but the love of God first, and your love next, are my comfort and stay. We may, perhaps, be made to feel some of the brunt of the battle in our various funds; but the Lord liveth. Our great Dr. Gill said, ‘Sir, I can be poor, but I cannot sell my conscience,’ and he has left his mantle as well as his chair in our vestry.

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About Me

Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Moody Stuart said, "Ruth Bryan's letters are remarkably like those of Samuel Rutherford's, closely resembling them in most winning, unwearied, and gloriously endless eulogy of the King in His beauty." Joel Beeke says, "Ruth Bryan stands in a class of great female devotional writers, such as Anne Dutton and Mary Winslow, whose Christ-centered correspondence has helped hundreds of God's people drink more deeply of the wells of salvation."